W.R. Elsberry's The Austringer
Wesley R. Elsberry's personal weblog, talking about falconry, science, antievolution, computation, and the broken body he lives in.
Updated: 5 hours 32 min ago
Another Lawsuit Norm Coleman Can Look Forward to Losing
Al Franken will be certified as the winner next Monday in the Minnesota race for Senator against Republican Norm Coleman. It took a protracted recount process, at the end of which Franken was up by about the same number of votes as the initial count had him down by, a little over 200.
Expect Norm [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Bush’s Partial Protection
A news item notes that President Bush signed three new national monuments into effect and is being praised by various people for the action. Somewhat less prominent is the information that the area of these monuments, all in the Pacific Ocean, is a fraction of what marine biologists had requested receive protection. 2.2 million square [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Medical and Journalistic Shading
Marcia Angell has an article in the New York Review of Books that considers three books touching upon modern medicine and unseemly links to corporate pharmaceutical companies.
Angell takes up various problems, but I was intrigued when she got around to how companies now control research, sometimes shading a negative experimental result in a way that [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Texas: Religious Antievolution’s Silly Season
An astounding experience related by Nelson Thompson in a previous thread deserves more attention.
A recent experience has shown me that there is another attack upon evolution (and science in general) going on in Texas public schools.
I recently visited a relative in rural Texas, east of Huntsville. While there, I went for a walk down a [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Fragmentary Fossils
Mr. Elsberry;
I came across the talk origins site on accident as I was doing some browsing about the subject of origins (particularly intermediate or transitional forms). As a complete neophyte to paleontology I had a couple of questions and your answers seemed to be some of the most cohesive that I found. How are partial [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Steve Fuller’s Crusade
Sociologist and post-modernist Steve Fuller has joined the posting crew at Uncommon Descent, joining such luminaries as David Scott Springer and Denyse O’Leary. Fuller has a couple of posts up already, and is offering his analysis of what “intelligent design” argumentation ought to be. That is, a sociologist is proposing a prescriptive philosophical take on [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
A Capsule Summary of the Status of Dembski’s Explanatory Filter
William Dembski’s “explanatory filter” (EF) has been offered as a “rational reconstruction” of how work gets done in various scientific fields. However, it does not actually comport with such work. A direct refutation can be found in Gary Hurd’s chapter in “Why Intelligent Design Fails” from Rutgers University Press.
Taken at another level, Dembski’s EF has [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Casey Luskin on the Ad Hominem
Casey Luskin shows that, once again, antievolution correlates with moral relativism. In a post criticizing Ed Humes, Luskin slips in some criticism of me as well.
On a personal note, I am familiar with these kinds of attacks. In one single forum at Antievolution.org, created and owned by a former National Center for Science Education staff [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
A Targeted Linux Site — LinuxSlate.com
During my recent trip, I was able to meet up with “Crossbow” from LinuxSlate.com. LinuxSlate is his site to give reviews and commentary on Linux as used for mobile and embedded systems. As stated on the sidebar, the site originated as a means to distribute Linux device drivers for the screens in Fujitsu pen-based PCs. [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Out with the Old
Old school creationist and antievolutionist Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo, were convicted of tax evasion, violation of laws against structuring withdrawals to evade reporting, and obstructing investigation of those crimes.
They appealed the convictions, their sentencing, the amount of restitution ordered, and the substitution of property for assets that would otherwise have been seized for [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Why the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Case Mattered
We recently passed the third anniversary of the decision in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case (this past Dec. 20th). Something to keep in mind is that what is at issue isn’t science at all, but rather the pushing of a narrow sectarian religious view via the public schools. Our founding fathers knew [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Texas: Ken Mercer Confirms “Weaknesses” are Old-School Religious Antievolution Arguments
Texas State Board of Education Member Ken Mercer has an op-ed piece in the San Antonio Express-News. You may recall Mercer from his advocacy of various “weaknesses” taken from the religious antievolution ensemble of arguments at a hearing on November 19th. The opinion piece by Mercer simply confirms that Mercer doesn’t have a grasp of [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Morally Corrosive Antievolution: Another Case
Over at Uncommon Descent, a post by Mario Lopez takes note of a publication in Nature that mentions “mousetrap”. Lopez quotes from Nature, but drops in this bit of text as item 4:
4. “Darwinian scenarios, either for building mousetraps or biochemical systems, are very easy to believe if we aren’t willing or able to scrutinize [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Keeping Up Appearances
I updated the theme using the WordPress 2.x capable version of “Shaded Grey”. There are some features that aren’t yet working, like the drop-down styling of things in the sidebar. But I’ve gotten back the content of the sidebar items that went missing for a while, and that’s a happy thing.
Categories: Pro-Science News
The Christmas Wish List
The holiday season is upon us. Something we do each year is come up with a list of cool things (toys) we’d like for Christmas, or needful things (socks and underwear). There’s the small stuff that we’re likely to get some of, and bigger-ticket items that we can dream about. And, of course, season’s greetings [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Something Different for the Evening… Football
We don’t watch much football. Diane doesn’t like it much, and I’m not so much of a fan that I’d relocate to another part of the house to tune in. But this evening we turned on the game between the #1 Alabama Crimson Tide and the #2 University of Florida Gators. And I enjoyed it. [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Vindication
I’ve been saying that there were problems in William Dembski’s “explanatory filter” for a long, long time. I published a book review of The Design Inference back in 1999 that included the following:
According to Dembski, because humans identify human agency using the explanatory filter, the explanatory filter encapsulates our general method for detecting agency. Because [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Isn’t that Precious?
Ray Comfort expounds on the evolution of sex:
Sexual reproduction would never have begun to evolve, and would never have continued to evolve to become as sophisticated as it is today in many plants and animals, unless it offered a significant evolutionary advantage. As to what this advantage might be, however, is still the subject of [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Duke Researchers Find Large Amoeba that Moves
A Duke University press release notes the discovery of a large (1 inch diameter) marine amoeba that moves slowly and leaves distinctive tracks behind.
The distinctive trail that the Gromias leave is identical to mud tracks found in the fossil record, which throws a big wrench into one long-standing argument in biology. The fossil tracks pre-date [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
Bush Suffers Poisoner To Live — And Pardons Him, To Boot
Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times treats this story of a Missouri farmer receiving a rare Presidential pardon as just one of those “human interest” features. So, what was the fellow pardoned of?
Mr. Collier’s crime was unlikely and, he said in an interview, unintended. While hunting, he began noticing the reappearance of wild turkeys, [...]
Categories: Pro-Science News
